I don’t care if the whole game from end to end is generative AI if it’s an incredible game. Having a moral stance against a specific use of floating point numbers and algorithms in a medium filled with floating point numbers and algorithms is strange.

it's even worse then that

there is a whole basked of technologies which you can label as "gen AI" but which have non of the problems why people hate "gen AI"

as a very dump example, some pretty decent "line smoothing" algorithm are technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues

I agree, even though I'm not in favour of gen ai. It was a terrible mistake letting placeholder assets get out in the final release, but it shouldn't actually count as shipping AI-generated content in your product.

Generating a brick wall texture using an AI should be acceptable as well, even when it's not a placeholder.

I don't find it that surprising. The creatives that are against generative AI aren't against it only because it produces slop. They are against it because it uses past human creative labor, without permission or compensation, to generate profit for the companies building the models which they do not redistribute to the authors of that creative labor. They are also against it due to environmental impact.

In that view, it doesn't matter whether you use it for placeholder or final assets. You paying your ChatGPT membership makes you complicit with the exploitation of that human creative output, and use of resources.

Blanket ban on generative AI? Games have been using some form or another every since the days of RTS map generation and perlin noise

The problem of allowing "placeholder AI assets" is that any shipped asset found to be AI is going to be explained away as being "just a placeholder". How are we supposed to confirm that they never meant to ship the game like this? All we know is that they shipped the game with AI assets.

Blanket ban on AI generated assets, but nobody cares about AI generated code apparently. lol

But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Now they're automated off the back of somebody else's work. And here we have an admission, but how many artists are being sidestepped in major games developers now? It won't be long before the EAs and Ubisofts of the world fire theirs. Then it'll be developers. Then it'll just be a committee of dolphins picking balls to feed into a black box that pumps out games.

It doesn't seem strange that an industry award protects the workers in the industry. I agree, it seems harsh, but remember this is just a shiny award. It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.